Popular web sites now enable customers to create and order a variety of personalized print products, including inter alia calendars, greetings cards, notepads, and photo books. Customers insert their own text and photos within templates provided on the web sites and in retail stores, and fulfillers print the resulting photo products. Such web sites include www.snapfish.com operated by Hewlett-Packard Company of Palo Alto, Calif., www.shutterfly.com operated by Shutterfly, Inc. of Redwood City, Calif. and www.blurb.com operated by Blurb, Inc. of San Francisco, Calif. Such retailers include Walmart and Walgreens.
There are an increasingly large number of types of personalized print products, including books, calendars, note pads, and T-shirts. As such, multiproduct printing systems that receives orders for a variety of personal printing products must be able to print and manage a large number of types of print jobs. One strategy to enable a multiproduct printing system to print all the types of print products required is to direct orders to multiple printing facilities. For example, one printing facility may specialize in printing books and another may specialize in printing on T-shirts.
Competitive pressures also require a multiproduct printing system to be able to print and ship products very quickly. For example, it is typical for a printing system to print and ship an order in a day or two. This may be challenging when a recipient of the product is at a considerable distance, for example in another country, where express shipping may be prohibitively expensive or not available. One strategy for accommodating delivery to recipients in different geographic regions is to direct the print job to a facility closer to the customer or to a hub that can deliver quickly.
There is thus a need for a method and system to efficiently manage and route orders of personalized print products among multiple printing facilities, in order to guarantee fast delivery.